Monday, 27 October 2008

Lecture One: Welcome to the Labyrinth

‘If we dared and willed an architecture according to the kind of souls we possess (we are too cowardly for that!), the labyrinth would have to be our model’ Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Daybreak’, 1881

‘It is no longer possible simply to communicate a precise body of knowledge founded on a rigid status quo’ - Konrad Wachsman, ‘The Turning Point of Building’, 1961

While Microsoft was asking the world ‘Where Do You Want To Go Today?' in its first global marketing campaign, French anthropologist Marc Augé in his book 'Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity' described the passage of an international traveller through a series of temporary meaningless locations. The Bright Labyrinth is made up of a shifting series of links and nodes, equally temporary and equally without meaning in themselves, and yet they form part of a digital regime that has informed every aspect of our lives.

From the Labyrinth created by Daedelus to house the fabulous Minotaur, described in Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to the audible spaces, transparent barriers, invisible directives, electronic gateways, plans and outlines imagined by architect Rem Koolhaas for Wired magazine (issue 11.06 June 2003), we have found ourselves caught up in networks that respond to us and to which we in turn are obliged to respond. The embodiment of behaviourist strategies developed in the previous century, these networks have become ‘Bright Labyrinths’, laboratory mazes within which we appear happily doomed to wander forever.

Lecture One explores the geography of the Bright Labyrinth from the totally wired U-Cities of China, Japan and Korea to the interactive realm represented by Dusseldorf’s Real Future Store, where products loaded with RFID chips and Quick Response barcodes communicate both with consumers and with themselves.

By being able to see the network in the labyrinth and the labyrinth in the network, we can begin to develop a new series of attitudes towards research, making connections across disciplines that can ultimately inform and enrich our practice.

About Me

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents, London Noir and Krautrock. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman as ‘a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction, mind-bending reading’. He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Resonance FM, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. Ken is the author of Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press in the UK and North Atlantic Books in the US. His new book 'The Bright Labyrinth' is now available from Strange Attractor Press.